The Vision

Our vision is to reach our community and make a difference in the lives they live through the good news of Jesus Christ.
We believe we can accomplish this through helping people discover God's purpose for their life through teamwork, creativity and excellence.

What is Our Passion?

We believe that Jesus Christ makes it possible to know and experience God, each other, and our world in a new way. Jesus' life, teaching, death and resurrection make it possible for us to connect to God, and once that connection is made then our lives are changed. From there, we can also connect to our selves, our families and friends, and the world around us. By experiencing God's love, we find a way to express love and grace in our world. Jesus Christ makes it possible for us to be the people we've always wanted to be . . . to be ourselves. Our authentic selves.

Our passion is to help people connect . . . first to God, then to their authentic selves, and finally connect to the world around. That is our passion, our calling.

What Is Worship?

Defining worship is difficult since it's something most of us have been doing throughout our lives. Worship is also greatly influenced by our culture, so much so that there is a tendency to feel that in worship 'anything goes' as long as people within a given culture and context find it meaningful. While cultural and personal backgrounds do go a long way towards shaping our vision of "proper” worship, I do think that within Scripture there is a stable, working definition of worship. In the Christian and Jewish traditions, worship is a heartfelt response to God's saving actions.

Worship is an expression which grows from both emotion and intellect; it is the response of both heart and head to God's saving actions. Words like fear, awe, reverence, praise, and joy are used throughout the worship of Israel and the early church. Worship in the Old and New Testaments is never just about what we know, but about our feelings in the light of our knowledge.

Worship is always a response; it is a reaction to God's actions. Some of the verbs used in the Old and New Testaments talk about a personal and direct response. To worship is to bend our knees in awe before God, to raise our voices in praise to God, to state publicly our allegiance to God, and to fall on our faces before our God in reverence.
Worship is not a "general” response to God, but it is a heartfelt response to God's saving actions on our behalf. In the Old Testament, the covenant with Abraham and the deliverance of Israel in the Exodus are the terrific stories of God's saving acts. Israel responded to God because God had moved and was still moving in history to deliver them. The church saw the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as God's ultimate saving act. Worship is our response to what God has done to rescue us from ourselves and from the power of sin. God is active in our daily lives creating in us something of eternal beauty and value. Worship is our response to God's saving acts: what God has done in the past, what God is doing in our lives today, and what God promises to do for us in the future.

Principles of Worship
While the definition of worship is the same throughout the story of Scripture, the expressions of worship vary greatly with time and culture. The people of Israel worshipped God as a community in a Tabernacle while wandering in the wilderness, in three distinct temples in Jerusalem, and in various synagogues scattered in Jewish communities throughout the ancient world. The New Testament church worshipped both on the Sabbath in the synagogue or Temple and on Sunday in celebration of the resurrection. What they were doing was always worship, but where and how varied. So, how we respond to God's saving acts depends on our situation. There are general principles that guide appropriate worship within a given culture. The four principles that Cherry Valley follows are:

Cultural Relevance
If worship is about everyone in a community responding to God's saving actions, then worship must make use of language, words and forms that come out of everyday life. Jesus took items from everyday life to teach His followers about responding to God's grace: lambs and sheep, wine and bread. The focus of a worshipping community must always be on God, the forms and words take on new meaning as they are directed towards the God who acts to deliver and recreate.
Responsive and Participatory Worship finds its reality in relationships: the relationship of an individual to God and the relationship between a community and God. In worship, we respond to God's saving actions both as a community and as individuals. Worship takes place on many levels at the same time; we worship both as individuals who have experienced God's saving actions and as members of a community which has experienced God's grace.

Comes from God's Story of Salvation
In both Testaments of the Bible, the development of worship is built around the story of God's saving acts. The Jewish year was measured by feasts and holidays, preparation and celebration; the stages of life were measured through rites of passage within the worshipping community; and the structure of worship itself grew from the story of God's saving acts. In this sense, all worship was developed around the story of what God had done to save the worshipping community. Our worship reflects the story of what God has done to deliver us. Like the worship of the first disciples, our worship grows from what God has done for us in Jesus Christ and finds its roots in the worship life of the Old Testament community.

Enhanced by Technology
At its heart, worship involves communication. God's saving acts are communicated in worship and our responses are themselves acts of communication. Technology that enhances either of these acts of communication honors God and takes a proper place in worship. Technology must never be the focus of worship but when it enables response it can be an effective partner for worship.

Mission and the Church

Cherry Valley Presbyterian Church embraces mission as its central reason for existence. Mission is a process that involves stripping away the cultural and contextual material that was used to communicate God's message to specific people at a specific time. We understand that God always speaks in historical and cultural contexts; these contexts produce language which contain a mixture of Divine and human elements. The process called "decontextualizing” involves separating the human and Divine elements found within God's message as given in scripture. The message stripped of its cultural elements is often called the "kyrigma,” mirroring the Greek word used in the New Testament to denote the content of the apostolic witness (see for example 1 Cor 15.14 for such a use) in contrast to the instrument of delivery.
The inverse process is used to understand the significance of God's message in the modern world. The process called "contextualizing” involves taking God's message and understanding it within a specific cultural and historical setting.
Once God's message has been translated into a new historical and cultural setting, issues often still remain in translating it into the various layers that exist within any given culture. Class and gender issues often mean that different strata within a culture have different frames of reference even though they share common cultural values. The process of contextualizing God's message must often move beyond a specific culture and consider contextualizing the message into targeted strata within the chosen culture.